In order to transition successfully to the Australian Football League (AFL), an elite professional football competition, elite junior Australian Football (AF) players need to develop certain physiological and anthropometric characteristics including jump height, running endurance, acceleration, and speed.1 Further, players need to be able to win contested possessions and frequently deliver the ball inside the attacking 50-m zone in order to score for their team.2 High training loads are required in order to develop these characteristics and help bridge the gap between elite junior and elite senior (AFL) competitions.3 It is increasingly recognized that training and match loads need to be sufficient for elite football players to withstand the demands of competition, while not affecting their wellness to the extent that it would impact on the risk for injury.4 Players` wellness, informed by the recommendations of Hooper and Mackinnon,5 can be identified through 5 main factors: sleep, fatigue, soreness, stress, and mood. This easy-to-implement, practical and inexpensive questionnaire has previously been utilized in elite AFL players.6 Elite junior AF players can encounter various situations where their sleep may be disturbed, as identified in other elite team sports.7 Sleep, an essential part of the recovery process, provides both physiological and psychological benefits. Sleep can influence player fatigue through a range of mechanisms, including muscle glycogen resynthesis inhibition; muscle damage (identified by player soreness); and/or impairment of muscle damage repair, cognitive function and mental fatigue.7 Stress and mood, which represent emotional factors or disturbances,8 also play an important role in how players recover from training and competition. Athletes who have been identified as suffering from overtraining syndrome have been shown to exhibit a greater increase in total mood disturbance compared with athletes without symptoms of overtraining syndrome.9 Among healthy athletes, profile of mood states (POMS) factors of vigor and fatigue show the greatest changes in healthy individuals; however, in athletes showing signs of overtraining syndrome, the POMS factors depression increases the most, with up to 80% of affected athletes showing signs of clinical depression.10 Several research studies have explored load and wellness in AF players.6,11-15 These studies have identified that wellness (also described as "player coping") is related to external and internal load over a specific match, across the season, and specific wellness factors such as neuromuscular fatigue and soreness can be sensitive to overall load and load changes. However, none of these studies has examined load and wellness across a season or for the majority of teams in an elite junior AF competition. The aim of this study was to investigate associations between load (training and competition) and wellness in elite junior AF players across 1 competitive season.
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